Hello from Cambodia!

We are in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Our first impressions were that this city is too big and too dirty!! We spent the first evening here (after a long but comfortbale trip from Vietnam) in search of a restaurant on the "best riverfront area in Asia" (according to the Lonely Planet). After 10 minutes wandering through messy and intimidatingly dark streets past begging children, we settled on a very nice but very expensive restaurant looking out over the very dark, murky river. We went to bed that night with a very negative view of Phnom Penh and my (Rich) mind wandered through the joys of Vietnam.

The next day we were detirmined to give Phnom Penh and Cambodia another chance. We hit the road to head to S-21. This is where we learned all about the Pol-Pot regime and his Khmer Rouge Revolution. We learned some truly horrible things about what went on here between 1976-1979 and we saw some very disturbing places and photographs (I can imagine visiting Auschwitz would be a very similar experience). It is all the more harrowing when you realise this was sill happening 30 years ago and that the UN and "righteous" countries of the West did nothing about it - guess there was no oil or anything else of value. (although they did teach the Khmer Rouge how to make land mines, which continues to cause huge problems in Cambodia today)

S-21 was a prison for anyone who opposed or was capable of opposing the Khmer Rouge, this, to Pol-Pot meant anyone intelligent! So he rounded up all intelligent people in the country (so if you wore glasses, spoke a foreign language, had been abroad, or basically weren't a farmer) then you and all of your close relatives, (even children and babies) were brought to S-21 to be tortured, then taken to the Killing Fields.

We then headed to the Killing Fields for an equally harrowing experience. We walked through the mass graves of Pol-Pots victims, there are too many bones here to excavate and when it rains more bones, teeth and clothes rise to the surface. There is a memorial tower containing hundreds of skulls. Cambodia strongly welcomes foriegners to see these sights to educate us all about what happened just 30 years ago and ensure it will never be forgotten or repeated. It was certainly a memorable experience.

We headed from here to the Russian market for a stroll but the bargains were few and far between. This was one market where the wallets did not come out to play (too much)! I think we'd bought enough already! We then hopped in a tuk-tuk to head to the Silver Pagoda and Royal Palace.

After finishing our cultural sight seeing we stumbled across the riverfront. There were kids and families playing football and having picnics in the bright sunshine on a nice big patch of grass between the Mekong River and the Royal Palace. I grabbed the opportunity to take a few penalties against some local kids and we sat on the banks of the river watching the sun go down. We had finally discovered "the best riverfront in Asia"!! and it was only around the corner from the dark mess that we had walked through the night before. Then as a litte bonus the Prince had obviously heard that we were in town so he popped out of his golden gates to give us a wave as he drove by.

We also made friends with a rather charming fellow in a wheelchair, whom we wheeled over to a little fruit market and bought him a coke for his "birthday"!

We ended with a delicious meal and our opinion of Phnom Penh completely reversed! We are off to Siem Reap tomorrow.

Bye for now, roll on Angkor Wat!!